In Eris, you find yourself on an alien planet, with your only way to get off being the alien mother ship secured in a heavily fortified alien base. The base is being powered by oil drilling towers scattered across the map. You must find and capture these towers to shut down power to the main base, allowing you to get in and steal the mother ship.

Eris is a game about freedom. You can plan your attack on an enemy tower however you see fit. You could walk in the front door with a shotgun in one hand and a grenade in the other. You could grab a jet pack and come in through the roof. You could sneak in through the back door in the middle of the night with cloaking device and a silenced pistol. It's up to you to decide.

You earn XP by killing enemies and capturing towers. XP can be spent on perks, stat boosts, and tower defenses.

Perks and stat boosts play a large role in Eris. Perks can be anything from a parachute to the ability to quickly dash in any direction. Stat boosts effect things like weapon accuracy, health, run speed, ect. These things can dramatically change the way you play the game. Grabbing double jump and boosting your jump height allows you to scale up exposed stairways, and boosting your armor and grabbing the dash perk can make you a serious threat in close quarters conflict.

Tower defenses, such as turrets, are a must if you intend to leave a tower you have captured and have it stay captured. You buy defenses with XP, and can immediately place them where they are needed.

Multiplayer will be a big part of the game. Playing online with friends, deciding whether to team up, or fight for control over enemy towers. We have a team system implemented that allows players to form teams. Anyone on your team can place defenses in your towers, and your turrets will automatically attack anyone not on your team. Teams can be any size, from one player teams, to one big team.

We've been doing development videos since the very first week of development. You can check them out on our channel.

Got enemies automatically spawning this week, which allows me to play the game without having to worry about spawning enough enemies to test a given feature. Enemies will now automatically spawn inside towers they own. I've also implemented a global alien AI that randomly picks a tower on the map and spawns waves of enemies to attack it.

Other big feature this week is a placeholder set of arms and a new gun.

We also added a little bullet hole decal for when bullets hit hard surfaces.

The rest of the week was spent tweaking recoil and optimizing existing features.

Travis is out of town this week and it’s my birthday, so this video is a little short on content.

Big feature this week is additional turret functionality. Turrets now have functioning rocket launchers and flamethrowers, and you can kill turrets now.

I got a waypoint system working as well, and tested it out on a tower warning system. A waypoint will pop up if one of your towers is under attack and you are hanging out somewhere else in the world, showing you which tower is under attack and where it is.

I also played around with some post processing effects, and added some new stat boosts.

Awesome concept, nice execution too, but you seem a little lost on your direction.

You're calling it a tower defence game, but that's only because the buildings you attack/defend are towers. Maybe it's more like a survival/shooter game? There's some other tropes from the tower defense genre, but maybe it's not the kind of game tower defense fans would normally look for. I guess for this you need to think about what your aims for the player's experience will be...

One thing I saw that didn't really fit was that you have this dark game which is starting to capture the dark feeling of being stuck on an alien planet surrounded by hostiles, then each time you hit an enemy some bright, arcady XP and damage indicator comes up. The idea of perks is nice and would add a lot to your game, but maybe you could fit it better into the setting? Upon killing an enemy could they drop some energy or artifact for you to spend on upgrades?

Just my thoughts, hopefully they help. You've certainly made a great start.

I've had people be confused by calling it a tower defense game in the past. I'm just not sure what else to call it.

It's hard to explain the game within traditional genres. It's more similar to a multiplayer game mode like domination than a true tower defense game. I feel like calling it just an open world FPS kind of undersells it.

Battles tend to get very hectic with the new ships. I recorded a video where I've got like 3 ships spawning enemies, explosions everywhere, enemies breathing down my neck...unfortunately I was playing music at the time and could not use the footage for fear of YouTube flagging the video for copyright. :/

The multiplayer will be sort of like Left 4 Dead in that you'd just play through a map with a group of people. No persistence or anything. I'm not sure if we're gonna have the budget to swing dedicated servers. Regardless of whether or not we do, there will be the option to start your own server.

Yeah P2P will work okay for 4 player coop, I imagine 8 players might get a bit tricky depending on how deterministic your game is and how many moving parts the clients are expected to remember. Games like Starcraft manage to have 8 players playing P2P with hundreds of units because they're super deterministic - it's the reason you can't join a game midway or skip to the end of a replay. Even unit positions are stored as integers, it just tricks you visually by not aligning them perfectly to the grid underneath.

I was on vacation, and Travis has added a new member to his family this week, so we didn’t really have time to work on the game. We decided to put up some unedited gameplay rather than have nothing this week.